kernel news – 01.05.2013

– OF documentation and patches at core and drivers, to be used by
for embedded media systems;
– some I2C drivers used on go7007 were rewritten/promoted from staging:
sony-btf-mpx, tw2804, tw9903, tw9906, wis-ov7640, wis-uda1342;
– add fimc-is driver (Exynos);
– add a new radio driver: radio-si476x;
– add a two new tuners r820t and tuner_it913x;
– split camera code on em28xx driver and add more models;
– the cypress firmware load is used outside dvb usb drivers. So,
move it to a common directory to make easier to re-use it;
– siano media driver updated to work with sms2270 devices;
– several work done in order to promote go7007 and solo6x1x out of
staging (still, there are some pending issues);
– several API compliance fixes at v4l2 drivers that don’t behave as
expected;
– as usual, lots of driver fixes, improvements, cleanups and new
device addition at the existing drivers.

-Also, Mauro announces edac fixes:

– i7300_edac currently reports a wrong number of DIMMs when
the memory controller is in single channel mode;

– on some Sandy Bridge machines, the EDAC driver bails out
as one of the PCI IDs used by the driver is hidden by BIOS.
As the driver uses it only to detect the type of memory,
make it optional at the driver.

-Rafael J. Wysocki has ACPI and PM updates:

The cpufreq changes are the largest batch this time, mostly due to
the Viresh Kumar’s work on the core cleanup. The feature most likely
to make some headlines is the ARM big.LITTLE cpufreq driver, also from
Viresh.

Next in size is the cpuidle update with the majority of work done by
Daniel Lazcano. That is code consolidation and some cleanups mostly,
hopefully non-exciting stuff.

In addition to the above we have a usual ACPICA update containing
material from February and March releases, an update of the ACPI core
related to hotplug and a number of assorted fixes and cleanups in
ACPI and PM core.

– NLM: stable fix for NFSv2/v3 blocking locks
– NFSv4.x: stable fixes for the delegation recall error handling code
– NFSv4.x: Security flavour negotiation fixes and cleanups by Chuck Lever
– SUNRPC: A number of RPCSEC_GSS fixes and cleanups also from Chuck
– NFSv4.x assorted state management and reboot recovery bugfixes
– NFSv4.1: In cases where we have already looked up a file, and hold a
valid filehandle, use the new open-by-filehandle operation instead of
opening by name.
– Allow the NFSv4.1 callback thread to freeze
– NFSv4.x: ensure that file unlock waits for readahead to complete
– NFSv4.1: ensure that the RPC layer doesn’t override the NFS session
table size negotiation by limiting the number of slots.
– NFSv4.x: Fix SETATTR spec compatibility issues

-Matt Fleming has various EFI fixes:

This first pull request is a merge of v3.9 into f53f292, as requested by
Ingo because I botched the original merge of v3.9-rc8 (which is currently
in tip/x86/efi) by losing the “select UCS2_STRING” line from
drivers/firmware/Kconfig. An equivalent line has been added to arch/ia64
in this merge.

-Catalin Marinas has an arm64 pull request for -rc1:

Main features:
– Versatile Express SoC (model) support – DT files and Kconfig entries
(there are no arch/arm64/mach-* directories). The bulk of the code has
already been moved to drivers/ as part of the ARM SoC clean-up.
– Basic multi-cluster support (CPU logical map initialised from the DT).
– Simple earlyprintk support for UART 8250/16550 and FastModel console
output.
– Optimised kernel library bitops and string functions.
– Automatic initialisation of the irqchip and clocks via DT.

-David Teigland and dlm updates for 3.10:

When the kernel clears flocks/plocks during close, it calls posix
unlock when there are flocks but no posix locks. Without this
patch, that unnecessary posix unlock is passed to userland
(dlm_controld), across the cluster, and back to the kernel.
This can create a lot of plock activity, even when no posix
locks had been used.

This patch copies the nfs approach, and skips the full posix
unlock if there is no plock found during the vfs unlock phase.

-James Bottomley has SCSI updates for the current merge window:

This is the first round, consisting mostly of drivers and patches
submitted 3 weeks ago. Since I’ve been travelling quite a bit, there
will be a second round just before the merge window closes for all the
patches three weeks or newer, or which got flagged for my attention
after 10 April.

The patch set is mostly driver updates (qla4, qla2 [ISF support
updates], lpfc, aacraid [dual firmware image support]) and a few bug
fixes.

Mostly about syscall wrappers this time; there will be another pile with
patches in the same general area from various people, but I’d rather push
those after both that and vfs.git pile are in. Please, pull from

git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/viro/signal for-linus

Shortlog:
Al Viro (20):
get rid of duplicate logics in __SC_….[1-6] definitions
teach SYSCALL_DEFINE how to deal with long long/unsigned long long
consolidate cond_syscall and SYSCALL_ALIAS declarations
make HAVE_SYSCALL_WRAPPERS unconditional
make SYSCALL_DEFINE-generated wrappers do asmlinkage_protect
switch signalfd{,4}() to COMPAT_SYSCALL_DEFINE
convert sendfile{,64} to COMPAT_SYSCALL_DEFINE
switch epoll_pwait to COMPAT_SYSCALL_DEFINE
switch getrusage() to COMPAT_SYSCALL_DEFINE
convert vmsplice to COMPAT_SYSCALL_DEFINE
consolidate compat lookup_dcookie()
merge compat sys_ipc instances
get rid of compat_sys_semctl() and friends in case of ARCH_WANT_OLD_COMPAT_IPC
x86: sys32_kill and sys32_mprotect are pointless
x86: trim sys_ia32.h
ppc compat wrappers for add_key(2) and request_key(2) are pointless
sparc: no need to sign-extend in sync_file_range() wrapper
make do_mremap() static
get rid of union semop in sys_semctl(2) arguments
syscalls.h: slightly reduce the jungles of macros

-Theodore Ts’o updates ext4:

Mostly performance and bug fixes, plus some cleanups. The one new
feature this merge window is a new ioctl EXT4_IOC_SWAP_BOOT which
allows installation of a hidden inode designed for boot loaders.